The Censorship Pendulum

BEIJING — IF you want to understand the current state of self-expression in China, the best indicator must be the line “Sorry, the text has been deleted.”

Last year began as a relatively permissive period for expression of opinion. Following the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party, in November 2012, officials both in Beijing and in the provinces acknowledged the need to heed criticisms coming from the people.

Such criticism was not to be found in the official media, of course, so one had to go looking for it in the world of Weibo, the microblogging site. But often you wouldn’t find the criticisms there, either, because Weibo was chock-full of the message, “Sorry, the text has been deleted.”

The contrast between official welcoming of criticism and actual resistance to it is both contradictory and completely normal. For many party officials, the more sharply they are criticized, the more embarrassingly their lack of administrative acumen is exposed. So they welcome criticism (if at all) only when delivered in private.

Material posted on Weibo has been deleted ever since the service began in 2009, but the more the service grew — it now claims more than 500 million users — the more pervasive these deletions became. Censorship is initiated in part by the government, but the managers of Weibo and other social media sites do much of the deleting.

Why? It all has to do with profits. China’s Internet companies, unlike other sectors, are mainly privately run. They don’t dare offend the government — if the government suppresses them, the money they’ve raked in so quickly will just as quickly be flushed away. So they take the lead in deleting blunt criticisms, which has earned them the unflattering label of “eunuchs responsible for their own castration.”

But these private companies also quietly allow critical voices on Weibo. Even as posts are deleted and accounts are canceled, new ones spring up. My own microblog often gets tips like this: So-and-so’s account has come to a bad end, but now it’s been resurrected, so take a look at the repackaged version.

People like to hear voices critical of the government, so the companies can’t silence them entirely. Instead, they track the shifting line of acceptable criticism. They know that government officials will put up with some bland sniping, but see to it that the criticism falls within limits officials can tolerate. It’s a bit like a wolf saying to a flock of sheep, “I’m going to let you bleat, on condition that you don’t bleat loud enough to attract attention.”

But as voices criticizing the government become more and more numerous, pointed and strident, our officials get hot under the collar.

Someone once asked me: “When will China ever have real freedom of speech?” I responded optimistically: “When ‘Sorry, the text has been deleted’ disappears from the world of Weibo.”

But I was wrong: Events moved in precisely the opposite direction. Last August, the government began a large-scale clampdown on Internet “rumors.” More than 100,000 Weibo accounts were permanently shut.

Many of these accounts may indeed have peddled rumors, but many had also served as platforms for widely read criticisms of the government.

By October, I found that the line “Sorry, the text has been deleted” had nearly disappeared from Weibo. By then there were no real critical voices to be heard — or if there were, they were simply criticisms too anodyne to call for deletion.

For more than three years, I’d been disgusted with this refrain. But when it finally went away, it wasn’t because freedom of expression had arrived, but because even harsher controls had been imposed.

Then, in December, all of a sudden, “Sorry, the text has been deleted” reappeared on Weibo. It was just in isolated pockets, here and there, but it came as a relief. I felt as if I could stick my head above water and catch my breath. I even hoped this message would flood Weibo once again.

In the 30-odd years since China embarked on reforms, it has alternated politically between repression and moderation. I’m quite inured to these pendulum swings.

As part of the latest crackdown on corruption, officials will probably again declare, “The Party and the government must accept the people’s supervision and criticism,” as they’ve said so many times since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949. But I have a feeling that the more they say this, the more “Sorry, the text has been deleted” will appear online.

This reminds me of an old story from ancient times. A man was crossing a river by boat when he accidentally dropped his sword into the water.

He made a mark on the side of the boat, indicating, “This is where I dropped my sword.” When the boat got to the other bank, the man dived into the spot in the river where the mark on the boat was. Of course, the sword wasn’t there. Our officials’ superficial attitude of welcoming criticism is like carving a mark on the boat where the sword falls into the river, but then letting the boat proceed to the opposite bank, where the sword can never be found: a place that says, “Sorry, the text has been deleted.”

Yu Hua, a contributing opinion writer, is the author of “Boy in the Twilight” and other books. This article was translated by Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.